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How to Remove Your Name & Address From Search Engines

by Virginia FrancoUpdated September 15, 2017

Items you will need

Google and Yahoo accounts

Name removal subscription provider

Many are surprised to Google themselves and find their name scattered all over the page. Anytime you post a comment, respond to a blog or sign a guest book, your name and e-mail address become part of Internet memory. Internet search engines keep cached records of past pages they have indexed, which is how your name can continue to appear even after years have passed. Removing or burying your name from Internet search engines can be difficult and time consuming, but not impossible.

Contact the webmasters for any site in which your name appears. Kindly request that they remove your name. There are three sites available online to help you identify who the right contact person might be to request your name be removed: 1) Networksolutions.com, 2) Whois.domaintools.com, and 3) Internic.net.

Subscribe to a service to bury your name so that it appears after the 50th entry in a search. Studies show that most Internet searchers give up after the 20th entry or so, so your name should be safe from prying eyes if you are buried anywhere beyond that. Removeyourname.com and Reputationdefender.com are just a few.

Get a Google account of any kind, whether Gmail or Google Checkout, and access thee removal tool to help you remove URLs fro Google's search engine. Yahoo! has a similar tool to remove URLs from its search engine, although its steps for content removal slightly differ from those on Google. You can access both tools using the Resources links provided below.

Delete any profiles or classifieds that may contain your name. If you have a profile on Facebook or MySpace, you can cancel your account to delete your information.

Use pseudonyms going forward whenever you post information online. This will effectively eliminate any chance of your real identity popping up on Internet search engines in the future.

Tips

Once your name has been eliminaed, try typing your telephone number into a search engine. If your name or address appears, then you are still locatable using the Internet. Consider eliminating the ability to use your telephone number as a search tool with Google's PhoneBook Name Removal. Other popular search engines, including Yahoo!, also have tool removal options similar to this one.

Warnings

The web has a very long memory and, short of full compliance from every webmaster for every guest book you have signed, there is no way to completely remove your name and address from a search engine.

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This article was written by the It Still Works team, copy edited and fact checked through a multi-point auditing system, in efforts to ensure our readers only receive the best information. To submit your questions or ideas, or to simply learn more about It Still Works, contact us.